> Throwing an exception does not necessarily mean that your program is suddenly in an unsupported state, and therefore does not require terminating the entire program.

That's not what a panic means. Take a read through Go's panic / resume mechanism; it's similar to exceptions, but the semantics (with multiple return values) make it clear that panic is for exceptional situations. (IE, panic isn't for "file not found," but instead it's for when code isn't written to handle "file not found.")

Even Rust has mechanisms to panic without aborting the process, although I will readily admit that I haven't used them and don't understand them: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.resume_unwind.html